I downloaded the Marvel app and got a subscription for the first time last night (Feb 28, 2025). There’s a level of adultery I feel that I’ve committed. It took me years to get this far, but ultimately, going digital started small. It started with reading pirated chapters of Berserk online.

I’ll never forget that moment at the 2250 S. Grove Union Hall where a newer friend, Paul, and I were standing in the large main hallway next to the bathroom and he asked me, “Have you read the manga for Berserk?” I was dumbstruck. What was he talking about? There were manga chapters that take place after the 1999 anime? What? What!

It was a mild, blue-sky day in Lansing, Michigan, my freshman year of college. I wasn’t one to check the release dates of anything in those days apart from comics. I knew what issues came out each week, but I’d generally swing by Best Buy to see what new CSs or DVDs dropped on Tuesdays. There it was on the shelf – Berserk Vol. 6! I bought it and rushed back to the dorm. I assembled the boys. At minimum, Aj and James. There were probably more, but I’m not sure who it’d be. (This was over twenty years ago.) It was better than grad new comic day. New Berserk!

[Mild Spoilers for general plot points of Berserk in only the following paragraph.]

Disc five had left all the boys on the edge of our seats. Griffin had betrayed the Band of the Hawk and raped the princess! All because he felt betrayed by Guts because Guts had chosen to go his own way. Once the king found his daughter’s condition, the Hawks were ambushed by the army and killed or scattered. This is where AJ, James and I had been left. What we then experienced was, at least for me, lifechanging. Together we watched the episodes one after another as the small glimmer of hope afforded by Gut’s return not only dwindled, but a hole of despair open in my first-floor dorm room and swallowed all of us. We were trapped in the abyss with The Band of the Hawk. And I never walked out of there, never knew how to escape for years wandering without the knowledge of whether Guts could or would escape. We were decimated. There was a level of funk, even when I’d rewatch with so many friends over the next decade until Paul and I finally talked anime.

[Spoilers Ended]

“Berserk has a manga?” My brain was exploding. Why wouldn’t it? It made total sense. At this point I don’t think I’d begun reading manga series yet. The one exception would have been Full Metal Alchemist. My groomsmen and I had sat on the bare carpet of my empty apartment the week before my wedding watching FMA on a TV or laptop on a chair. Everything that had required a moving truck had already been moved to 21st and Michigan. At some point around 2010 or 2011 I had caught up with FMA and began reading ahead. I’d even bought Volumes 21-24 at the Barnes and Noble in South Bend. It was ground breaking because the story had deviated so much from the original anime.

“Yeah, there’s got to be at least one hundred new chapters since the anime ended?”

Foaming at the mouth, “You mean you know how Guts escaped?”

“Yeah.”

“Does Casca survive?”

He gave a blank faced, “I’m not sure.”

At least the conversation went something like that. If you’ve met me, and we’ve spoken, you’d know I do like to bring a little life and exaggeration to my conversations.

Coming in Part 2: My Transition to the Digital Realm of Manga